Romney poll watching app reportedly glitchy

A much-touted mobile app used by Romney campaign poll watchers to track voters faced hiccups across the country Tuesday that left one prominent conservative Romney critic declaring it on Twitter “nothing short of a failure.”

The system, known as the ORCA Project, was intended to give the Republican challenger’s team real-time information so campaign workers could call, text or visit people who hadn’t yet voted in attempts to corral them before polls closed.

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Yet dozens of Romney poll workers across the country took to Twitter throughout the day to gripe that they were unable to log in, lost data they had inputted or found it moving slower than they needed to keep up with poll traffic.

Jeffrey Cook, a Romney poll worker from Fort Dodge, Iowa, gave up after eight hours of being unable to log in and tried to provide his data over the phone after the campaign sent out information about a telephone helpline.

“The helpline said the system was unresponsive because of high volume,” Cook wrote to POLITICO. “Well no duh, genius. Didn’t you know how many people would be using the system? Ridiculous. Nice try.”

GOP and Romney officials denied any problems but refused to directly answer whether there had been any disruptions.

GOP activist Ali Akbar, president of an organization for conservative bloggers, disputed that and called the system “nothing short of a failure.” He said he was enthusiastic about ORCA when the Romney campaign briefed him about the system Monday night.

Akbar and others noted the campaign provided a list of phone numbers in pivotal states for poll workers having problems with ORCA to call to report the information they couldn’t log in to input. That step would imply an expectation that the system wouldn’t be flawless.

“This looks like hundreds and hundreds of people,” said Akbar, whose popular Twitter handle @ali became a central repository for ORCA complaints. “Something’s going wrong. More people are experiencing problems than are saying it’s working.”